The Clintons will attack Obama in harsh, personal terms for two main reasons: they hope to attract attention from the media, which they need to overcome Obama's advantages in paid ads, free media coverage (like the extraordinary coverage of his extraordinary Houston speech last night), and field organization, and they want to instill doubts about Obama in the voters in Ohio and Texas who threaten to follow the pattern of the last ten votes, where in the last few days across all demographic groups there has been a decisive change of mind among the Clinton-leaners to move to the Obama side.

The attention-seeking will work. The free media, especially the cable shows, will report the Clintons' charges. The allegations may be straight from the Rove playbook -- illogical, self-contradictory, twisted, trivial. But whatever they are, they will be reported. In a sense, it is the news that Mrs. Clinton and her sharp-tongued surrogates want to make and so they deserve the coverage.

But

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We understand that the Clintons want to raise Obama's negatives. They have been doing it for weeks now, most pointedly in encouraging surrogates like Billy Shaheen and, famously, Bill Clinton to inject racial stereotypes into the voters' calculus.

But what is the point of attacking Obama for not debating his rival in Wisconsin or for giving good speeches or for swapping metaphors with Duval Patrick?

If we have to have still more debates, we are going to have a hard time keeping the electorate awake for the rest of this campaign. The voting is entrancing; the speeches are awesome; the crowds are stunning; the debates are the least interesting or illuminating aspect of the whole campaign. I understand that if the Clintons are short on money, they would want debates to substitute for the advertisements they can't buy. But buying ad time to complain about the lack of debates is passing strange.

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